The Boston Slave Riot of 1854

The Boston slave riot of 1854 was a contest for the soul of Boston in which slavery supporters won the battle but lost the war.

Anthony Burns

An angry mob of abolitionists tried to free a captured slave and failed, but the struggle awakened fervent anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North. It sent Wendell Phillips on a speaking tour throughout the North, transformed Ralph Waldo Emerson into an ardent abolitionist and convinced Henry David Thoreau to urge civil disobedience.

Anthony Burns

On the night of May 24, 1854, federal marshals seized 19-year-old Anthony Burns on Court Street and wrestled him into the courthouse on a trumped-up charge of jewelry theft. Burns was born into slavery in Virginia. When he was 15, his arm was mangled in the sawmill where he was working. He was later hired out to work on the wharves of Richmond, where he befriended a sailor from Boston who helped him escape.

Wendell Phillips, the wealthy, 42-year-old son of Boston’s first mayor, and the rest of the city’s abolitionists were horrified by the arrest. It wasn't so much that the Fugitive Slave Act was being enforced -- it had taken effect in 1850. They were upset by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act two days earlier. Kansas was certain to enter the Union as a slave state, and slavery opponents feared slavery could seep north into Boston as well.

Indignation at Burns' arrest was intensified by the presence of several abolitionist and women’s rights groups, who were checking into Boston hotels for their annual convention.

Wendell Phillips, by Matthew Brady

The next day Wendell Phillips went to see the terrified Anthony Burns in the courthouse. He persuaded him to accept legal help from Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

The Boston Slave Riot

A large and furious crowd gathered at Faneuil Hall to protest Burns’ capture. Phillips gave a speech, asking 500 volunteers to surround the courthouse the next day. Unknown to him, another abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had bought axes and planned to attack the courthouse to free Burns. At a pre-arranged signal, the crowd surged toward the courthouse. The mob failed to free the prisoner, but a guard was killed in the melee.

As many as a thousand troops poured into the city to restore order as the trial got under way.

After a four-day trial, the judge ordered Burns back to slavery as Phillips watched helplessly in the courtroom. He visited Burns in his cell. “Mr. Phillips,” Burns implored, “has everything been done for me that can be done? Must I go back?”

On June 2, Boston was placed under martial law. Anthony Burns was to be shipped back to Virginia. As guards prepared to march him to the ship, nearly 50,000 people lined the streets, held back by Marines and police officers. Storefronts were draped in black, and people hung out upper windows spitting on the soldiers as the crowd shrieked, ‘Shame! Shame!’ Burns walked through the crowd with his head held high to the ship that would carry him back to Virginia.

The sight of a solitary black man walking through the busiest street in Boston was not soon forgotten. President Franklin Pierce had hoped that stern enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law would quell opposition to it. He miscalculated badly. The Boston slave riots intensified feelings against slavery in Massachusetts as the federal troops had seemed to place the commonwealth 'under the feet of Virginia.'

Aftermath

Wendell Phillips sank into depression, from which he emerged with fresh resolve to take his anti-slavery message out of Boston to the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes. He had the blessing of his invalid wife, who would spend long weeks at home without him.

Burns wrote to Phillips from a jail in Richmond, Va., asking him to ‘dow all you can for me.’ His owner refused to sell him to abolitionists, who had raised $1,200 for the purchase.

Finally, Anthony Burns was put on the auction block and sold to David McDaniel. McDaniel agreed to sell Burns to the Boston abolitionists for $1,300. He returned to Boston.

Wendell Phillips arranged for Anthony Burns to attend Oberlin College, where an anonymous donor gave him a scholarship. Anthony Burns would graduate, become a Baptist minister, and die of tuberculosis at the age of 28.

Phillips became the country’s foremost orator against slavery. After the Civil War, he championed the rights of women, Indians and labor. In 1870 he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a labor and temperance candidate. He lost.

Wendell Phillips died on Feb. 2, 1884. In July 1915, a monument was dedicated to commemorate him in Boston Public Garden.